RealNetworks confirmed yesterday that it is to reduce its workforce by 10 per cent by axeing 130 jobs at the internet media company.
Despite the lay-offs, the firm's CEO Bob Kimball said it would continue to hire people in what he described as "growth areas" for RealNetworks.
Job cuts will hit engineering, sales, marketing and …

COMMENTS

Poor Real

I stopped using RealPlayer when it became abundantly clear that I could expect it to:

a) Do annoying things such as callback home with unique ids

b) After objections to a) still do it but bury disable options in far flung places of the app where few people would find them

c) Run background processes all the time for no good reason

d) Nag me to buy the premium version

e) Lead me around a maze of links on the Real site just to find the free version when it needed an upgrade.

None of these things are true of VLC so I switched. Real had it's day in the sun and it blew it.

The other thing I remember Real for is the monumental cockup of RealDVD. Here is a product that stripped out DVD copy protection and replaced it with an even more intrusive proprietary DRM. Sadly for Real it didn't even get to be a commercial product because DVD stakeholders took offence to it DeCSSing DVDs. Maybe they should have cut the stakeholders in on a piece of the action.

Real exist in enterprise

Despite the irrelevance of their client software on the desktop, they are (or were 2 years ago, when I last had anything to do with them) big players in the enterprise server space, and also in the client side of mobile phones.

Their Helix Mobile server is capable of some pretty funky things such as constant stream negotiation (over RTCP) with the client to present an uninterrupted stream to a mobile device that has variable bandwidth over the course of a streaming session. Particularly useful for content providers to stream 3gp video to low end devices that do not support flash etc.

So long nagware

Crapware

There used to be a website called Crapware (now it;'s not functional" where people got to vote for software that wasn't malware or a virus, but was just poorly designed and behaved horribly. As I recall, RealPlayer was voted #1 Crapware of all time.

IP for billing mobile streaming

I would guess (but have not checked) that they still might have a few bits and pieces from their work on mobile streaming here in Germany. Cannot be billed for a bit that did not arrive sort of thing.

Still wondering where my friend from Real is these days who was working on that project with Vodafon with some of the first Nokia multimedia phones (2002-2003.) Flat rate was not accepted as a solution here in Germany as it would be in the US.

Not just the nagware but retail version also!

Re: Not just the nagware but retail version also!

As I recall, if you are using a Windows machine you can block the ads with your HOSTS file.

With nothing else running, start a packet-logger program then start RealPlayer. Hit a few buttons to show a few ads, then stop your packet-logger and look at what you captured. Set any ad domains in your HOSTS file like this: